by Andy Farrell does not hangover for long. They seem to be on a pretty long list of what he considers a waste of time. He seemed very concerned when anyone asked him last week if his team was down after the World Cup.
“Honestly the World Cup has nothing to do with it,” Farrell reiterated late on Friday night. “All the talk about hangovers, we don’t have any hangovers. There is a hangover for tomorrow. We are three months down the line. It’s a big hangover if you can’t get over it in that time.”
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Ask Fabien Galthié about that or maybe give him a minute to swallow another paracetamol. At 9pm local time on Friday there wasn’t much between France and Ireland, they had a few favorites for the championship. If anything France was slightly ahead as they had home advantage for this match and whoever won it won the grand slam in 2022 and 2023.
They spent the last four years chasing each other up the world rankings all the way to the knockout rounds of the World Cup, where they met in both finals. South Africa beat France by a point, New Zealand beat Ireland by four points.
Ninety minutes later, the gulf between them seemed as wide as the Mediterranean Sea. A 38-17 win will do that. In the French papers, it was not only a loss but, as Sud Ouest put it, “humiliation”, and a sign that “something is broken” in Galthié’s team.
It was their biggest win since he took over and the first time they had lost two games back to back under his leadership. Galthié won a payout from a French tabloid last week after they published photos of him naked on the beach with his girlfriend, Belgian actress Helena Noguerra. After this result, he can count that as the second most embarrassing thing he has been through in recent times.
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Galthié blamed Paul Willemse, who was shown a red card in the 31st minute, but even he had to admit that there were big problems here. “Our offense wasn’t there, we obviously missed chances, we conceded turnovers, dropped balls, suffered from a lack of speed.”
France plays Scotland next, which was already shaping up to be the most difficult game of the championship. Galthié only recently signed a new contract, but has rubbed many people the wrong way over the years and it won’t take much more public opinion to turn against him. It is not really clear what Farrell would have to do to get the Irish players and public to give up on him. At this point, he could probably go shepherding up and down O’Connell Street in the nude and complete it as a master class in strategy and man management.
Ireland produced one of their best performances in Marseille, a record five tries and a win. Farrell and his players took a quiet, clear satisfaction at a job well done, but no one was giving up. Some even worried about what they could have done better.
“It was just there,” Dan Sheehan said. “It’s special to be able to win against France in France because it’s a hostile environment where the crowd gets behind their team. We did well to control most of the game, but there are a few things we can fix.”
“It felt good at times, certainly the first 30 minutes felt very good,” said Ireland captain Peter O’Mahony. “We felt like we were all over them defensively, as our attack was rolling, and our line out was going well, but at the same time there were areas, like in the last 10 minutes before half time when we supported a couple. penalties, where we put ourselves under pressure. So we have a lot to do.”
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Something that feels ominous to everyone else. Sheehan and O’Mahony picked up control of Ireland, which they felt had eluded them once or twice too often. “We were giving too many penalties around halfway, which allowed them to kick into our corner, and we got stuck a little bit, in both halves,” Sheehan said. He also ticked off a few other things he wanted to improve on.
“We probably didn’t reset quickly enough a couple of times, a couple of times we could have tried to score a step or two earlier, or maybe a couple of times when we worked hard to get out of our own half. .” All of this speaks volumes about the attitude Farrell has brought to this team.
“We’ve been talking all week that this isn’t a new journey, it’s just a continuation of the one we’ve been on,” Sheehan said. “We’ve been great at 90% of what we’ve done before, so now it’s just a matter of getting going again.”
